Love Machines

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Love Machines

__ The secret history of a mass-market appliance. __

Among the electric eels and the first Medtronics pacemakers at Minneapolis's Bakken Library and Museum of Electricity in Life is a collection of 11 electric tools dating from the turn of the century. The oldest of the bunch, manufactured by Weiss Instrument Manufacturing Company in the 1890s, is a rectangular metal box with a leather housing and a snaky arm hanging down alongside it. Another, shaped like a blow-dryer with a rubber ball attached to the end, purrs when plugged in. A larger, flatter, stainless steel blow-dryer vibrates and throws mild shocks.

The tools had been catalogued as "musculo-skeletal relaxation devices," but that was a bit of a fudge, because the Bakken's curators didn't quite know what people were meant to do with them - until Rachel Maines explained it. The musculo-skeletal relaxation devices were medical vibrators used by Victorian doctors to masturbate their patients to health.

The promulgator of this revelation has agreed to meet me for dinner at The Algonquin hotel in New York. So far, none of the Friday-night sleeks striding through the lobby look like they'd ever put their careers on the line for much - let alone an odd piece of machinery most academics wouldn't admit to owning. But I spot Maines as soon as she walks in. Dressed in sensible shoes and a serviceable raincoat, this woman clearly hasn't worried about what anyone would think of her.

But then, if she had, she never would have spent 20 years researching and writing The Technology of Orgasm - published in December by Johns Hopkins University Press - a scholarly, albeit racy, piece of research that got her booted from her job on the faculty of Clarkson University.

We order. "What," I ask Maines, a PhD from Carnegie Mellon, "were you doing searching for vibrators?" "I wasn't," she laughs. Actually she says, she was at the library, paging through turn-of-the-century women's magazines like Modern Women and Hearst's while researching the relationship between labor and needlework. Tucked in between pitches for Ivory soap and emmenagogue (read: abortion-inducing herbs), "I kept seeing these ads of women pulling their dresses down and applying a tool to their necks and shoulders." The ad copy promised the effect would be "thrilling," "invigorating," "all the penetrating pleasures of youth will throb in you again."

The tools themselves consisted of what Maines describes as "a sloppy electrical motor in line with a handle." They were at the time the epitome of modern machinery: The works were metal, the handles wood or Bakelite. The whole gizmo weighed 5 to 15 pounds, depending on the size of the motor. One of the earliest models, the 1899 Vibratile, was nothing more than a coil of wire and sold for about $5. Later, more deluxe products, packed in velveteen-lined boxes with brass fittings, went for as much as $20.

Maines turned from the history of suggestive ad copy to the history of medicine to uncover the fact that vibrating machines weren't designed to relieve shoulder spasms, but to treat a condition that doctors proclaimed arose from the failure to achieve orgasm.

What was the link between vibrators and health? Hysteria, says Maines. Today, the word means anything from uncontrolled tears to wild antics, but prior to the 1920s, the condition had a much more specific etiology. "It meant 'womb disease.'" From the dawn of recorded medical history, healers had observed that women, unlike men, didn't release fluids during sex; as a result, pent-up juices, trapped in the womb, caused all sorts of problems - headaches, irritability, fear of impending insanity, hysteria.

With the same scientific insight that generated this diagnosis, the medical profession lit on a cure. Doctors and midwives massaged the genitals to "hysterical paroxysm," as the orgasm was scientifically termed, to release held-back energies. By the end of the 19th century, some doctors were advising women to come in for such treatments once a week.

But the task of bringing an overwrought woman to orgasm was seen as a time-consuming and tricky chore. One early physician likened it to trying to rub one's head and stomach simultaneously. So, in 1883, to relieve overtaxed physicians of their manual duties, Dr. Joseph Mortimer Granville, a Brit, developed the perceteur, a version of which Maines would find in the basement of the Bakken museum.

Given the tenor of Victorian times, it's not easy to picture doctors masturbating strait-laced middle- and upper-class women in their offices. Didn't those doctors know what they were doing? "Well," Maines says, "we all know - with a capital K - that real sex is penetration to male orgasm. When there isn't penetration to orgasm, they figured, there isn't sex." (And you thought that was an Arkansas idea.)

If fin-de-siècle euphemisms kept things happily vague, it was an entirely different story when, in 1986, Maines published her first article on the vibrator in a Bakken newsletter. The Clarkson administration, according to Maines, was convinced her research would drive away alumni funders and summarily dismissed her. (Clarkson refuses to comment on the incident.)

Three years later Maines's piece on "Socially Camouflaged Technologies" appeared in the IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, whereupon she received a panicky call from the journal's rather staid editor, Robert Whelchel. The advisory board of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, its publisher, was furious; the board thought her carefully footnoted, nine-page article was an elaborate practical joke concocted by Whelchel and guest editor James Brittain - and they were not amused. Whelchel was told that if he didn't produce proof of the existence and legitimacy of this so-called Rachel Maines at a formal inquiry, the IEEE might shut down the 17-year-old magazine. Meanwhile, it had set about investigating every one of her 51 footnotes. At the meeting, according to Maines, a letter from the Society for the History of Technology was produced to verify her authenticity, and the antivibrator faction backed down.

__ Of the first gadgets to be electrified, the vibrator beat out the vacuum cleaner by a decade. __

The dissonance surrounding the tool was exactly what made the Johns Hopkins press choose Maines's book for its technology series. "It's the contested ground that yields the most interesting material," says Hopkins editor Bob Brugger. "This is an artifact that no one has taken seriously." Maines reveals not only the idiosyncrasies of an earlier era, he adds, but also how firmly people believed one could make a tool to remedy anything.

During the last two decades of the 19th century, more than 50 kinds of vibrators were invented. Some combined vibration with music, while others threw ultraviolet rays. The technology really took off in the late 1880s, after the development of AC power. (Batteries hadn't been effective, says Maines, "because they could never really deliver the juice, or the thing would just stop halfway through the job.")

Once rural America had been wired, all manner of domestic appliances were fast to market. The first to be electrified was the sewing machine, in 1889, followed by the fan, the teakettle, and the toaster. The vibrator beat out the vacuum cleaner and the iron by a decade. Sears, Roebuck may have been the first to put together every housewife's dream: a home motor with attachments for churning, mixing, beating, grinding, operating a fan - and vibrating. Star put out a $5 portable model. "Six feet of cord," its ad trumpeted. "Perfect for weekend trips." The product most widely advertised in women's magazines was the White Cross, whose effects were as "wonderfully refreshing" as treatments costing "at least $2 each in a physician's office."

As AC motors got smaller and more efficient, home vibrators began to shrink, too. But right from the beginning, doctors had tried to warn women away from small-scale versions. To make sure women understood the difference between mere trinkets and medical tools, doctors' models continued to look reassuringly professional - i.e., large, expensive, and hard to operate. Maines's favorite is the Chattanooga, which was mounted like a Tommy gun on wheels so that it could be dragged along the body. Selling for $200, it was so heavy that it had to be freighted, according to the Vibrator Instrument Company catalogue. Another popular item was the Carpenter, which hung from the ceiling and looked exactly like an impact wrench.

Over a dozen manufacturers, including Hamilton Beach and General Electric, were in the vibrator business by the 1920s - and then, suddenly, the tool disappeared from middle-class life. Why? "No one knows," says Maines, "but my hypothesis is that it had something to do with vibrators appearing in stag films. Once people started seeing the tool in that context, they couldn't pretend they didn't know what it was." In Widow's Delight, a porn film of the 1920s, for instance, a woman comes home with her date, chastely pushes him away, and then rushes into her bedroom, rips off her clothes, and pulls out her vibrator.

Maines spent some 20 years researching her mysterious machine. But more than unearthing the device from the total oblivion of the middle part of the century, her scholarship focuses on recuperating it from that earlier period during which it was still in plain view: The vibrator of the late 1800s was not invisible but camouflaged, obscured by the rhetoric of medicine and domesticity. Maines took on those disguises as her intellectual challenge. "Technology," she writes, "tells us much about the social construction of the tasks and roles it is designed to implement."

In the '70s, after Kinsey et al. started referring to clitoral orgasms, Our Bodies, Ourselves trailblazers like Betty Dodson and Joani Blank began to use the tool to teach women how to give themselves real sexual satisfaction. Since then, something of a design explosion has occurred in the vibrator business, says Rebecca Suzanne, marketing manager for Good Vibrations (www.goodvibes.com/), one of the country's oldest feminist sex shops. For instance, the typical round head has been supplanted by likenesses of beavers, dolphins, eggs, and a pearl protruding from a clamshell. And the computer chip has made possible one of the smallest vibrators yet: the Cybervibe, a 2-inch mini controlled by a 10-speed push-button remote.

Good Vibrations sells 160 kinds of vibrators, and most still cost about the same as they did a hundred years ago - between $15 and $50. So, what's the most popular model? Hitachi's Magic Wand, considered the Harley-Davidson of vibrators because of the power it delivers. Forty-five dollars will get you one - and its package features pictures of chaste-looking women applying the tool to their necks, backs, and hands.